Exhibition Review

The 'Perspectives' exhibition took place at Uclan university located in Preston town centre. In the university there where an exhibition floor with metal railings going along the walls. The frames sat on the metal railings on the wall on metal hangers.

This is what the metal hangers looked like when on the railings. The railings had hooks on that slid up and down so you could position the frame wherever needed. The images where all positioned at the same hight and roughly the same width apart.
Where the images where put tried to complement each other. For instance my image was a fairly dark and low lighting images and that was in the middle of two very bright and colourful images. The images all complemented each other.

This is the layout of my group of images. I believe this works well with complementing each other's images. Also the two surrounding images are in landscape and mine is in portrait. 

I didn't like my final image because of how grainy and noisy it was. I know that this is because of the lighting and iso I was using. The iso was at 800-1000 depending on the shot. The lighting was continuous. I did this because I wanted to keep all the detail of the freckles and that using flash would blow out some of the detail of the skin.

This is the image that was used for the exhibition. I like the image as an idea but it could have been a lot better due to the grain. Thankfully some of the detail is still there but not all that could be, again due to the high iso the image is slightly softer too. If I was to do this shoot again I would have used a flash, maybe a harsh flash or a reflector just to add a bit more light and bring down the iso more. Overall I do think it is a good image I just don't like how it came out, it could have been better with the detail and other aspects of the image. Essentially this is the raw untouched image, no sharpening or touching up. The only edits in the image is just processing the raw file into a jpeg

The images that where used here I really enjoy looking at. I especially like the left image because of the pureness and simplicity of the image. I like the composition and how innocent with the leaf it almost makes the image look playful but with a quite contrasting facial expression. It could have a little more head room just to add a little more framing to the image. 

The image on the right works really well with the composition in that it has looking room and the facial expression is that of wonder and content. She looks like she's looking into this blank space wondering about something or is in deep thought. The lighting works really well and I think it looks great. 

Overall I really enjoyed this project and the exhibition considering the time scale we had and the little amount of preparation we had for the exhibition.

Comparing the work produced to the artist.

 A lot of the work produces was inspired hugely by these two artists Alec Soth and Irving Penn. I really liked Penn's portraits because of the level of detail in the features of the person weather it be freckles or wrinkles but I also like the simplicity and the pensive look of most of his portraits. They're always very neutral which, personally, think that this adds to an image, he isn't relying on any feeling or emotion to capture these interesting people. Penn's work has a slightly more fashion look to them. With the final out come it had the intention of using both artists as inspiration. My first shoot shows this a lot more than the second shoot does due to the majority of the first set of images being black and white more like Penn's images.

 


















As you can see the work is quite different, Penn usually shooting for companies such as Vogue and other fashion magazines whereas Soth's work is more exhibition style using more interesting subjects or people off the street instead of models. I think this is what makes Soth's work so interesting.

here are a few images from the second shoot. I believe that this shoot was a lot more successful than the first as i had planned what emotions i wanted the model to portray. This resulted in a wider range of images to choose from and a lot more potential final images. My only issue with this shoot was what the model was wearing but sat the same time i preferred this to the black sweater as it gave me a good example of white balance and allowed me to get the perfect white balance and colouring for the final image.

This is my final print framed and in the exhibition. From this exhibition i have learnt that where you place the images around other images can really change things. For this my image was placed next to two fashion images and mine was in the centre. The image to the left was very bright and colourful whereas the image to the right was very high key and bright. This was a good lay out because all the images contrasted each other and no matter which image you was looking at, that image would stand out from the group.
I have also learnt that when framing images attention to detail is a must. Every smudge mark must be cleaned and the frame and glass wiped down with a cloth. Even though you may not see the smudge you still must clean your frame. Its all about presentation when it comes to exhibition and getting the frame perfectly level and aligned so it matches the rest of the images. Even the name tags must all be the same, same font, text size, border and mounting. The effect this has on you as an artist is that people will start to think that if you're well presented and clean looking framing that they will assume that you know what you're doing and will be more interested in your work.

Final Image

This is my final image for print. I chose this image because of the colour tones and emotion on her face, both of which i really like. sadly I couldnt use the editing technique i would have have liked to. This is because of the high iso in camera settings. However, this does work in my favour to as it does give the image an effect of having film grain, an effect i really like.

on the image shown you can see the before (right of the image) and after (left of the image) and how in raw i've altered the settings to get the effect and colour i liked. In the other close up image you can see how the high iso has effected the image showing the grain of the background in the blue highlighted area and the softness due to the iso in the red highlighted area.

the full image shows post editing using the same techniques shown earlier and from a distance looks amazing with the colours and the detail in the image but if you zoom into the image at 100% you can really see the flaws in the image. The grain in the image is a lot worse and starts to show up on the models face and not just background but the level of detail in the image is good in my opinion, especially around the eyes.
I also changed the image size from 24x20 to 20x16 because i knew that due to the high amounts of grain that would really show at a larger size. I have learnt from this experience that in the studio where there is smooth backgrounds that shooting at an iso that is higher than usual can't be done without a lot of grain. I have also learnt that a high iso does effect the sharpness of the image.

Equipment

the equipment in used was a 5d mkii due to the larger sensor and higher iso tolerance. I did this so i had more flexibility when post processing. The lens i used was a 24-105mm with an aperture of f1.4 I decided to use this lens for the flexibility again. i can zoom in for a portrait shot of zoom out for a full body shot.

Planning Shoot 2

For this shoot I am going to be doing a very similar thing to last week but instead of asking her to smile a little I'm going to ask the model to be completely neutral with her mouth but smile with her eyes as I think that's the most important feature of someone's face. If I can capture something that shows something through her eyes I think it will be a successful shoot.